Written signatures are an important personal identification attribute. Despite the advent of information technology and the development of electronic identification attributes (such as personal keys for cryptological purposes) associated therewith, written signatures continue to be indispensable in many fields of everyday life because of their meaningfulness and their simple method of application. Thus, for example, even documents generated with computer support, such as credit card vouchers or cheques, at present still have be personally signed as evidence of their genuineness (or authenticity).
Frequently, there is the necessity of having to check written signatures for their authenticity. For this purpose, the personal signature to be checked is compared with a signature of the same person generally stored previously. It is obvious that, with a large group of individuals who may have to provide a signature, many signatures have accordingly to be stored centrally. In the case of large undertakings, such as banks, this is done in so-called signature lists. Another example of the central storage of signatures is publicly accessible registers, for example the Company Register.
In order to make possible an automated signature comparison and also for many other computer-aided applications, it is necessary to store personal signatures in an electronically processable form, for example as a signature file. The individual cheque to be checked can be scanned in and processed manually without difficulty in order to convert the signature contained thereon into an electronically processable form. However, this procedure is not very efficient in the creation of extensive signature lists or registers that form the basis for the signature comparison. The reason for this is, in particular, that the necessary manual operations are associated with a high time expenditure and, in addition, are extremely susceptible to error.
The object of the invention is to provide a method and also a system that make it possible to convert a large number of personal signatures that are available on physical media such as sheets of paper quickly, efficiently and without error into an electronic form for further processing.